Product Description

In West Texas, college men play football with intense passion. During a winning season the running back, Gary Harkness, is fuelled by fear of, and fascination with, nuclear conflict. Among players the terminologies of football and nuclear war - the language of end zones - become interchanged.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #137030 in Books
• Published on: 1986
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780140085686
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Don DeLillo's second novel, a sort of Dr. Strangelove meets North Dallas Forty, solidified his place in the American literary landscape in the early 1970s. The story of an angst-ridden, war-obsessed running back for Logos College in West Texas, End Zone is a heady and hilarious conflation of Cold War existentialism and the parodied parallelism of battlefield/sports rhetoric. When not arguing nuclear endgame strategy with his professor, Major Staley, narrator Gary Harkness joins a brilliant and unlikely bunch of overmuscled gladiators on the field and in the dormitory. In characteristic fashion, DeLillo deliberately undermines the football-is-combat cliché by having one of his characters explain: "I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don't need substitutes because we've got the real thing." What remains is an insightful examination of language in an alien, postmodern world, where a football player's ultimate triumph is his need to play the game.

About the Author
Don DeLillo is the author of two plays and thirteen novels, including Underworld and The Body Artist. He has won the National Book Award, the Jerusalem Prize and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize.

Customer Reviews

a sharp start
This very early product from the mind of DeLillo is sharp with the kind of ideas DeLillo would go on with, though not always successfully. His characters in this book are both base and philosophical, and the narrator, Gary Harkness, is a man who is into both the visceral thrills of football and world destruction as well as the higher functions of meaning and love. DeLillo mixes the base grunts of football with the war philosophy of Sun Tzu, and this book maintains that level through short, precise explosions of thought and action. While other books like _The Names_ tend to talk more about philosophy rather than exemplify it, _End Zone_ is a surgical airstrike in itself, and well worth the read.

DeLillo's hilarious satire of football and cold war paranoia
End Zone gives us Don DeLillo in his element, commenting on the American condition through one of its most indellible pasttimes, college football, and with hilarious results.

Pulling from his world of unique characters we are presented with a narrator at his third college in as many years, deep in the heart of Texas, and obsessed with nuclear holocaust. The metaphor of football as war is easily addressed but this story is driven by the quirkiness of its offbeat oddball football players and insane collection of coaches.

The predominatly white, southern team is shaken up with the addition of a potential All-American black running back and their head coaches' desire to retain the gridiron glory he once had. The coach has an undeniable Paul Brown/Woody Hayes quality to him.

The team struggles with each game, their individual neurosis and each other as the country lives in the paranoia and gloom of the nuclear menace.

Without a doubt some of DeLillo's most humorous writing while keeping the aura of his fiction in tact.

A football book that isn't about football
Certain football fans may be left dissatisfied with Endzone. A football book that is not really about football at all, DeLillo uses the adventures of Logos College fullback Gary Harkness as a point of departure from which to explore aspects of post-structuralist systems theory that became his trademark in later books. DeLillo's study of the polysemous nature of language in relation to meaning is first-rate. The parallel he establishes between the jargon of football and nuclear war demonstrates how the deterioration of semiotic meaning within language can threaten personal creativity and individuality. Caught in this suffocating network of interlocking symbol systems, Gary finds in football the only means by which to express himself freely and independent of the sterile reality around him. For Gary, football is an end unto itself, whose jargon and primitive physical contact provides him with an alternative system of meaning away from the ascetic chaos of the postmodern world. In this way, DeLillo underlines the inherent value both of physical activity and verbal creativity as expressions of individuality, which rise above the constraints of a language system devoid of expressiveness and order. An oblique and thoughtful novel, Endzone may enthral you - but only if you have the inclination. Those of you, however, who are neither literature students nor semiotic theory enthusiasts, may find it tiresome, pretentious, or just plain dull.